yes its true, all of it - the internet doesn't really exist, so it must be.

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Some thoughts on/from the last 2 days.

1. The mix of people actually worked quite well, but that was lucky - it would bebetter to have more structure another time. When cool points came up,we shoud facilitate them being captured, nailed down, aired...etc

2. Academics (professors) tend to profess - they also tend to profess "their thing"all the time without trying to listen to others first and then re-structure theirthing to fit - this is worse with engineering minded folks (the MIT gang) than with social/humanaties/user type folks - hence interventions from Alan Blackwell (despite or because of his strategy of being contrarian), and especially from Aaron Sloman were most useful.Surprisingly (in a very good way) John Doyle was awesomely good at this too, as well as having presented the most thoughtful (along with Aaron) piece of the day.

3. Key take homes

Architecture is probably a badly wrong word, but we're probably stuck with it.Constraints that Deconstrain are crucial - crucially, picking the right constraint(e.g. IP, the narrow waist of the hourglass) was a constraint, which freed upeverything above and below...It isn't clear whether evolution (natural selection, survival of fittest of multipledifferent species) is better or worse than intelligent design - certainly bacteriaappear to use a mix in some sense, and networks (and other artefacts of"architecting") appear to use a mix too...(there were _many_ precursors to the Internet Architecture - this is also true of mobile phone tech,, operating systems (pre unix/OSX/Linux), utilities, etc)

Users are important - William Gibson didn't just say"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed";He also said that "the street finds its use for tech":so when mobile phones added SMS as an after thought, people started to do gifting(emoticons etc) - twitter followed suit - and people (*users*) revised twitterto add #tags, retweets, mentions - this is true of use of email for filesharing, anduse of OSNs for photos

Elephants in the room

-- We didn't ask any architects (in the Frank Lloyd Wright sense) Actually it's not clear to me that that would have helped (much)

-- We didn't say much about ethics- there's not really such a thing as an "ethicallyneutral technology" -- many of the early internet technology inventors appeared tohave a strong societal gifting ethic -- so (in my experience) from 1980 til at least 2000, much of the work towards manking the internet work and deploying it, was done bypeople for free or for little personal gain in wealth terms (ok, so a lot of socialcapital accrued, although often with people who didn't really do the main work) - youfind a lot of the internet architects also do other stuff they don't speak much about(e.g. community nets in their home towns) - Bruce Maggs at Akamia/Duke, runs freecommunity wireless access - Kevin Fall and other folks at Berkeley deploy wirelessmesh nets in develping countries ....

-- Creeping asymmetry (in the sense of apps, power, centralisation, access links, abilityto server as well as be a client) - we mentioned the "evil" that is centralisation andp0wning of personal data by Online Social Network behemoths but this is just part and parcel of the post gift-era Internet - and the failure to maintain symmetry of powerbetween all Internet uses goes right down to the wire (asymetric capacity on uplink &downlink for ADSL and for 3G/4G, lack of always on, globally reachable IP addresses,all the way up to stunning operating systems on appliance-like tablets and smartphones so they can't act as servers or routers, blocking of P2P apps by ISPs, and soon and so on...)

4. Future workshop possible themes

A. I agree having some social scientists study folks like clark/doyle/wroclaski"doing architecture" to some new stuff(my 3 examples, for example) might yielduseful some methodology forre-use in education (in computer science/engineering courses).

B. doing something on what Jane Q. Public "think" the net is,and how they (re-)invent uses for it would be good

C. It'd be good to get some people from industry (perhaps industrial design)engaged too..